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Self-help guru Tim Ferriss is the author of number of best-sellers aiming to help readers improve their lives (Picture: File)

Self-help guru Tim Ferriss, author of several best-selling books, tells Metro how to make New Year resolutions you can stick to.

I don’t make resolutions. If you’re going to give up smoking, why wait until January 1? And healthy eating should be a part of everyday life, not something you embark on after a guilty festive splurge.
And then there’s the disappointment you feel when you can’t maintain your resolution.

The most popular new year resolutions usually resolve around self-help, self-improvement and health and fitness. But why do we feel the need to improve our lives?

‘It’s a lot like keeping up with the Joneses,’ says Tim Ferriss, author of several bestselling self-help books. ‘We’re bombarded with images of people who are slimmer and wealthier than us, so we tend to be dissatisfied faster. But, on a positive note, people who are driven recognise you never stay the same. You’re either getting better or getting worse.’

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Ferriss’s first book, The 4-Hour Work Week, spent four years on the New York Times Best Seller list. He was also listed in Forbes Magazine as one of 2011’s Names You Need To Know.

‘I don’t want my readers to feel reliant on me for answers,’ he says. ‘I want them to feel self-sufficient, so I treat myself as a guinea pig. I find the best ways to do things and teach them.’

In Britain, it’s estimated that self-help books have earned publishers around £60million in the past five years. And the British health and fitness industry is estimated to be worth £3.9billion, according to a report by The Leisure Database Company.

At the start of each year, we fuel these industries as we embark on resolutions. But according to research by Vileda, half of us will fail to stick to them for more than a month.

Most people will have succumbed to a cigarette or a packet of biscuits by now. If that’s you, help is at hand. Ferriss says we can turn our failed resolutions around using three things: stakes, minimal effect doses and ‘meta-learning’.

‘Most people fail at new year resolutions because there is no consequence,’ he says. ‘If you don’t go to work, you’ll lose your job. But if you don’t stick to your diet there’s no consequence – other than staying fat.’

He says creating stakes for your goal means you’re more likely to stick to it. His favourite way of doing this is by using a website called www.stickK.com. On it, you commit to a contract that will take money from your bank account to give to an anti-charity if you fail to meet your goal. ‘So if you hate guns, you could donate to the National Rifle Association,’ he says.

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He also suggests asking friends to get involved. ‘Take photos of you in your underwear and give them to a friend,’ he says. ‘If you don’t stick to your diet or reach your weight-loss goal, then tell your friend to post the unflattering pictures of you on Facebook.’

With regards to willpower, Ferriss thinks this is overrated and that people generally fail when they try to change too much at once.

‘It’s hard to change your diet and go to the gym regularly,’ he says. ‘So I suggest doing things in minimal effective doses. Only change your breakfast to start with. Then build up to changing lunch as well. Research by scientist BJ Fogg found the smallest change builds momentum to help you reach your goal.’

When it comes to self-improvement, Ferriss says it’s about having a method, which is where meta-learning comes in. ‘This is deconstruction. Take a complex skill, such as a language, and break it down into smaller pieces,’ he says. ‘You basically need to work out what 20 per cent of content of that skill you need to learn in order to give you 80 per cent of the change.’

He uses learning Spanish as an example, saying you can be almost fluent in the language if you find out what the most commonly used words are and learn them.

‘Sometimes the most common way to do something isn’t the best,’ he says. ‘You could follow the average text book for ten years and still not speak Spanish. I thought I was bad at languages at school as I couldn’t string a sentence together. But it was a problem with the method, not me.’

Ferriss maintains many break New Year resolutions due to lack of consequences (Picture: Getty Images)

Ferriss can now speak Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, German ‘and a bit of a bunch of other languages’. He has learnt to swim (something he says he was terrified of) and has a world record in Argentine tango – all using this method.

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So, if you feel like a failure, maybe it’s time to re-think your approach. ‘Quick fixes are fine but if you want something to be long-lasting, you need to think long and hard at the beginning and come up with a plan that’s reliable and fail-proof,’ he says.

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path To Cooking Like A Pro, Learning Anything And Living The Good Life, is out now. £21.99, www.fourhourchef.com Visit Amazon to buy the book here.